Okay, so I'm pretty excited. I've been taking advantage of free two-day shipping through Amazon Prime ever since I forgot to cancel my free trial membership last August and I got billed $79 (whoops!) for one year of membership. And I thought that was basically its only perk (beyond letting others in your house share the account with you). But then today, I was reading an article about how Netflix, over the next year and a half or so, is going to be losing some of its digital media rights due to companies losing money. In the article, there was mentioned that some other companies were also starting to get into the streaming scene, and one of those was Amazon Prime.
Say what?
I've known for awhile that Amazon had an instant movie streaming ability, but I don't know for how long many of the downloads have been free to we established Prime members. Awesome. I took a quick glance earlier and I noticed that while many of them are also common to Netflix (of which I have been a member for about three years now), there are a few that are unique (Amadeus, for instance). Pretty cool.
I finally, after much perusal, decided that I wanted to watch a documentary, so I clicked on the doc tab and one of the first results was this entry: Helvetica. I'm already fascinated by a documentary about a typeface (though, granted, not as excited as I am about typography itself) and even though-- I found out later-- it has been languishing in my Netflix instant queue for quite some time, I decided to check out the abilities of the Amazon Prime viewer.
I won't spend any time on it, other than it worked just fine.
On to the documentary:
Helvetica is apparently the most common typeface worldwide and by far the most ubiquitous. I love how the interviewees' names are onscreen in Helvetica. Obvious, but cool.
One graphic designer from Amsterdam said-- which really surprised me, though I think there's something very interesting and real about it-- that he really loved the Helvetica font because of its "neutralism". He liked the fact that the font itself doesn't "say" anything to detract or distract the viewer from the words themselves. There's no underlying message in the font. Another man worked with Microsoft on Verdana and Georgia fonts, and it struck me as a bit neat because I really like both Helvetica and Verdana.
Weirdos like me will love the part where typographer looks at the Helvetica letters and discusses things like the "ascender" and "terminus" and the thickness of letters and their heights, etc. It's really really neat. And, apparently, a typeface is more about the spaces between and within the letters than the dark parts of the letters themselves. Makes sense.
Oh my goodness, the extended metaphor with the Amalgamated Widget Company needs to stop. It lasts far too long. You can tell he's passionate about typefaces and advertisement. In contrast, the probably gay typeface designer who talks about how a type needs to look "less like a Saturn V rocket" and "more like Debussy" is hysterical. And so is his co-worker who remembers that the restaurant is "two blocks down from the sign with the terrible letter spacing."
People who work with fonts have trouble watching historical movies because of the oft-presence of anachronistic typefaces. Weird. And awesome.
These people are a bit nuts, but damn if I don't really want to work with typefaces. Like right now. I also blame, in part, my love of words.
The neutralism of the font really divides people into two factions: those (corporations, etc.) who prefer cleanliness and orderliness and modernism versus those who prefer that a typeface augment the meaning of the words on the page (or poster, etc.).
And that angry dude can be angry all he wants, but I'm still going to like my Arial, thank you very much.
To say that this is among the nerdiest documentaries ever made is probably an understatement of the highest order (as I assume King of Kong is among the dorkiest) but that doesn't make it bad, or the subject un-understandable.
Score: 8.5/10
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